scholarly journals 'Life?': modernism and liminality in Douglas Livingstone’s A littoral zone

Literator ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Terblanche
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Littoral Zone ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Modern Context ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Important Form

In an attempt to find his place within nature in South Africa and in a global modern context, Douglas Livingstone returns strongly to modernist poetry in his 1991 volume A littoral zone. In contrast to his predecessors like Wallace Stevens in “The glass of water” and T.S. Eliot in The waste land, this volume at critical moments gets stuck in a liminal stage. Images and poems, and eventually the volume as a whole, despite the highlights they present, say that it no longer seems so possible to end up also within the postliminal stage, so as to complete a rite of passage. Yet modernist poems such as Stevens’s “The glass of water” have the ability to end up in postliminal affirmation through and beyond the liminal stage of the overall process. Here light becomes a thirsty lion that comes down to drink from the glass, with a resultant transcendence of the dualistic between-ness that characterises the liminal stage in the modernist poetic mode, while this further results in the incorporation of a deeper and refreshing, dynamic unity. Even more remarkable is that this poetic rite is not of a closing nature, but open, especially in the sense that it affirms all that is possible and greater than the individual ego or subject, this, while getting stuck within a liminal stage just short of the postliminal stage can be in the nature of closure, as Livingstone shows, for example, when he says in “Low tide at Station 20” that humanity is trapped in its inability to see the original power of unity with and within nature in order to live within it; and while humanity remains an ugly outgrowth on the gigantic spine of evolution. In provisional conclusion this article finds that it will be better to view Victor Turner’s 1979 celebration of what he terms the “liminoid” in the place of a “true liminality” critically. Although it is impossible to return to a collective catharsis in watching a play, one cannot feel too comfortable about getting rid of the cosmological, theological and concrete embeddedness of rites of passage (of which a liminal stage merely forms a part). Van Gennep links these matters, and modernist poets are still able to express these interlinked matters with a powerful, sensitive effect of dynamic unity. Livingstone also does this, but in considerably lesser measure, and from within a considerably more uncertain context. The article ultimately shows that for these reasons and more, Livingstone’s volume deserves far more critical reading than it has received to date, and that despite one or two weaknesses – of which the employment of The waste land in the rather flimsy “The waste land at Station 14” is the most serious – the volume continues to make a rich contribution to South African life, or within any country that views poetry as an important form of human communication.

scholarly journals Echoes of the Vision of Hindu Philosophy in T. S. Eliot’s Writings

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-74
Author(s):  
Damauru Chandra Bhatta
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Four Quartets ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Yoga Sutras ◽  
Spiritual Nature ◽  
Love Song ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Living Objects

This paper makes an attempt to explore the echoes of the vision of Hindu philosophy in the selected works of T. S. Eliot. The works of Eliot such as his primary essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and his primary poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” The Waste Land, “Ash Wednesday,” “A Song for Simeon” and Four Quartets are under scrutiny in this paper. Eliot’s primary texts echo the vision of the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita and the Patanjali Yoga Sutras of the Hindu (Vedic) philosophy. The vision is that rebirth is conditioned by one’s karma (actions). No one can escape from the fruits of his karma. One needs to undergo the self-realization to know the Essence (Brahman). When one knows the Essence, he is liberated from the wheel of life and death. Man himself is Brahman. The soul is immortal. The basic essence of Hindu philosophy is non-dual, which says that all the living beings and non-living objects are the manifestations of the same Ultimate Reality (Brahman). Eliot suggests that the knowledge of this essence can help humanity to promote equality and justice by ignoring discrimination and duality, to end human sorrows and to achieve real peace and happiness. This finding can assist humanity in the quest for understanding the meaning of human existence and the true spiritual nature of life to address the human sorrows resulted from the gross materialistic thinking.

scholarly journals The Narrative Style and Voices in The Waste Land

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 1148
Author(s):  
Feiyue Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Land Uses ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Significant Challenge ◽  
Constant Tension ◽  
Narrative Poem ◽  
High Degree

The complexity, multiplicity and high degree of polyphony in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land presents as a significant challenge in terms of interpreting modernist poetry. While expressing concerns about Western civilisation’s collapse, as well as modern people’s spiritual barrenness, The Waste Land creates a constant tension through its usage of language, narrative structure and various different speech representations. This paper seeks to highlight that as a narrative poem, The Waste Land uses an abundance of narrations, descriptions and dialogues, while exploring how these various elements aid the poet to adopt a modernist narrative style in his poetry.

Art, understanding of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Lyas
Keyword(s):  
Alternative View ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Economic Organizations ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Church

Art engages the understanding in many ways. Thus, confronted with an allegorical painting such as Van Eyk’s The Marriage of Arnolfini, one might want to understand the significance of the objects it depicts. Similarly, confronted with an obscure poem, such as Eliot’s The Waste Land, one might seek to understand what it means. Sometimes, too, we claim not to understand a work of art, a piece of music, say, when we are unable to derive enjoyment from it because we cannot see how it is organized or hangs together. Sometimes what challenges the understanding goes deeper, as when we ask why some things, including such notorious productions of the avant garde as the urinal exhibited by Marcel Duchamp, are called art at all. Some have also claimed that to understand a work of art we must understand its context. Sometimes the context referred to is that of the particular problems and aims of the individual artist in a certain tradition, as when the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields is understood as a contribution by its architect to the vexing problem of combining a tower with a classical façade. Sometimes the context is social, as when some Marxists argue that works of art can best be understood as reflections of the more or less inadequate economic organizations of the societies that gave rise to them. The understanding of art becomes a philosophical problem because, first, it is sometimes thought that one of the central tasks of interpretation is to understand the meaning of a work. However, recent writers, notably Derrida (1972), query the notion of the meaning of a work as something to be definitively deciphered, and offer the alternative view of interpretation as an unending play with the infinitely varied meanings of the text. Second, a controversial issue has been the extent to which the judgment of works of art can be divorced from an understanding of the circumstances, both individual and cultural, of their making. Thus Clive Bell argued that to appreciate a work of art we need nothing more than a knowledge of its colours, shapes and spatial arrangements. Others, ranging from Wittgenstein to Marxists, have for a variety of different reasons argued that a work of art cannot be properly understood and appreciated without some understanding of its relation to the context of its creation, a view famously characterized by Beardsley and Wimsatt (1954) as the ‘genetic fallacy’.

Resetting the Type: An Exploration of the Historical Sense in Mrs. Dalloway

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Savannah Pignatelli
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Collaborative Relationship ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Talent ◽  
A Performance

Scholars often study instances of intertextuality within Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which they connect to both classical and contemporary authors. Though some of these scholars have noted a connection between Mrs. Dalloway and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, there has been little criticism that attempts to explain how this connection affects the meaning within Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf’s diaries reveal that she crafted her novel during the period in which she developed a personal and collaborative relationship with T.S. Eliot and his poem The Waste Land: Eliot recited the poem to Leonard and Virginia Woolf in June of 1922, two months before Virginia began writing Mrs. Dalloway, and she set the type for The Waste Land herself in 1923. In my paper I will examine how Mrs. Dalloway interacts with Eliot’s work, including his theoretical text “Traditional and the Individual Talent.” Meaning, in Eliot’s model, is cumulative and cultural. By tapping into the larger historical dialogue embodied by “tradition” meaning is transformed, created anew, challenged, and reproduced. In many ways, Mrs. Dalloway is a performance of Woolf’s ability to exercise Eliot’s concept of the historical sense. More importantly, however, Woolf’s appropriation of “tradition” allows her to collaborate with past authors to create meaning in the face of a changed world.

T. S. Eliot

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Dickey ◽  
Ria Banerjee ◽  
Christopher McVey ◽  
John Morgenstern ◽  
Patrick Query ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
American Girl ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Four Quartets ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
The Individual

Poet, dramatist, and critic Thomas Stearns Eliot (b. 1888–d. 1965) won fame for such poems as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), The Waste Land (1922), and “The Hollow Men” (1925), which ushered in and helped define the modernist era of literature. His critical writings also shaped literary taste and study in the 20th century. Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, by a Unitarian family with deep roots in American history, he was educated at Harvard and wrote his first significant poems during his year abroad in Paris, 1910–1911. After completing most of the work for a PhD in philosophy, he found himself abroad again during the outbreak of World War I, and he decided to marry an Englishwoman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and put down roots in London. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), surprised readers with its modern vocabulary, free-verse rhythms, and compelling dramatic voices. While working as a teacher and then a banker, Eliot established himself as an authoritative new voice in literary criticism with essays including “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), “Hamlet” (1919), and “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921). He introduced terms that shaped literary study throughout the 20th century: “impersonality,” “the objective correlative,” and “dissociation of sensibility.” In 1920 he collected his early essays in The Sacred Wood and published another volume of poems, including “Gerontion.” His personal life was not happy; he regretted having married a woman he did not love instead of the American girl he left behind in Massachusetts, Emily Hale (during his lifetime he wrote over one thousand letters to her). Considered his greatest work and probably the most significant poem of the 20th century, The Waste Land (1922) expresses his personal emotional conflict in terms of the larger historical currents of the immediate postwar period: the aftershocks of war, a crisis of faith, changing gender roles, urbanization, and a sense of deracination from the past. Erudite, multilingual, and difficult to read, but also highly charged with feeling, this poem captured the spirit of the interwar era, received more sustained attention than any other literary work in the 20th century, and is known and quoted across the globe. Eliot further distinguished himself by converting to the Anglican church in 1927 and becoming its leading poet and dramatist with his conversion poem Ash-Wednesday (1930), the play Murder in the Cathedral (first performed 1935), and the long lyric sequence Four Quartets (1936–1941). He also became a British citizen, so he can be considered both an American and an English writer. In the 1930s and 1940s he turned more toward drama and engaged with cultural and social debates in his criticism from a Christian perspective. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1948.

T. S. Eliot’s Recorded Experiments in Modernist Verse Speaking

Phonopoetics ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 137-168
Author(s):  
Jason Camlot
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
English Verse ◽  
A Performance

Chapter 4 offers a series of interpretive takes on T. S. Eliot’s 1930s electrically recorded voice experiments in reading his poem The Waste Land aloud. It traces Eliot’s attempt to invent a way to read modernist poetry. Explaining the production context of the 1933 recordings, the chapter situates Eliot’s audible reading experiments within contemporary debates surrounding the English verse-speaking movement, and Eliot’s work for the BBC. Finally, it provides a close-listening analysis of Eliot’s reading experiments with duration and amplitude, as well as a series of nonsemantic phrasing and intonation techniques, and especially the use of monotone in reading. Eliot’s method of reading is interpreted as a performance of the abstract conception of “voice” that functions as an organizing principle in New Critical discourse. Eliot’s recorded readings are heard to sound an organizing method of incantation that evokes the possibility of an overarching oracular or otherworldly voice.

Brooks, Cleanth (1906–1994)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Meehan
Keyword(s):  
Southern Literature ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
State University ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Southern Writers ◽  
Robert Penn Warren ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Louisiana State University ◽  
The American South

Cleanth Brooks was born in Murray, Kentucky, and spent most of the first half of his life in the American South. He taught at Louisiana State University (LSU) from 1932 until 1947, when he took a position at Yale. While at LSU, he and colleague Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) co-edited The Southern Review, which published both critical essays and creative writing, including that of modernist writers Ford Maddox Ford and Wallace Stevens. His prolific work on Southern writers, especially William Faulkner, made an unparalleled contribution to the study of Southern literature in America. He is perhaps best known for his influence on New Criticism, which pioneered an approach to the study of poetry that involved analyzing the structural, rhetorical and metaphorical elements of a poem through close reading, rather than relying on biographical and historical details for interpretation. Brooks expounded upon this method in his two most renowned books, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), which includes a classic reading of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947). These works, together with the popular textbook Understanding Poetry (1938), co-written with Warren, revolutionized the teaching of poetry in American higher education.

scholarly journals A narratological perspective on Douglas Livingstone’s A littoral zone (1991)

Literator ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 181-200
Author(s):  
J.H. Kahl
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Littoral Zone ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Direct Bearing ◽  
Connection With Nature ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Rachel Blau Duplessis ◽  
Autobiographical Narrative

This article explores aspects of the contemporary South African poet Douglas Livingstone’s “A littoral zone” (1991) from a narratological point of view, leaning largely on Peter Hühn’s narratological concept of the event and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ “hypothesis of poetry as segmentivity” as formulated by Brian McHale (2009:18). A discussion of two juxtaposed poems from the said volume explores how the poems’ respective anecdotes and events are segmented, then arranged and sequenced into specific narratives to highlight the speaker’s conviction of the necessity of a biological and spiritual connection with the natural environment. In the larger context of the volume there are numerous other narrative lines (in the form of poems about specific experiences the poet had) that are juxtaposed in a similar fashion. Collectively these juxtaposed narrative lines then constitute on the level of the volume as a whole the autobiographical narrative of the poet’s development as self-ironic individual. The various anecdotes also contribute to the formation and development of the theme of symbiosis, a theme that has a direct bearing on how the poet sees the gap between humankind’s current and supposed connection with nature. The main event of the volume is to be found in the reader’s mind: the realisation that bridging this gap is absolutely necessary and that it starts with the individual.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document